Girl In A Red Tunic

Chapter 2

Josse d’Acquin was on his way home. The November day was fine — bright sunshine sparkled off the frost and the ground was dry and good for riding — and Horace, his horse, who was fresh and well rested, felt eager and full of energy. But Josse was depressed, exhausted and too low in spirit to appreciate the beauty of England in the late autumn.

He had spent the past few weeks in the East Anglian port of Orford, having received a peremptory summons to hasten there with all speed on a mission of vital importance. The messenger had enjoyed being mysterious — when Josse had pressed him for details, he had smugly laid a grubby forefinger to the side of his large nose and shaken his head, murmuring just loud enough for Josse to hear that he was sworn to secrecy and would not break his oath if his very life depended on it — but in fact there was little need for the drama because Josse knew full well why they had sent for him.

How, indeed, could the matter be secret, when it concerned the entire population of England?

King Richard was a prisoner of the Holy Roman Emperor, Henri VI, and he would be held captive until his loyal subjects stumped up a ransom of 150,000 marks, not to mention the two hundred hostages who would have to give up their freedom in return for that of the King. The King’s elderly but vital mother, Queen Eleanor, had thrown herself into organising the collection of the ransom — there had now been three levies and still the money fell woefully short of the required sum — and the people of England had given till they could give no more. The first fine fervour of generosity had quickly faded; many had not felt it at all and those who had and who had unquestioningly given as much as they could were now beginning to regret it. The whole business was fraught with difficulties: the quick-witted, the crafty and the downright dishonest had evaded the earlier levies, and some of the collectors had proved less than trustworthy and had run off with what they collected. It was rumoured that King Richard was beside himself, frustrated to the very edge of sanity and driven to composing mournful self-pitying poems and miserable songs bemoaning his fate.

By October, 100,000 marks had been amassed and locked securely away in huge iron-bound chests stored, under heavy guard, in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral. When the Emperor’s envoys arrived in London to check on progress, they were sumptuously entertained and then sent on their way, the money solemnly handed over into their charge. Richard, with freedom beckoning, wrote to his mother commanding her to meet the remaining terms of the ransom and bring the rest of the money and the hostages to the Emperor in person; he commanded that Walter of Coutances, the head of the council of regency, accompany her. They were, he ordered, to present the most magnificent spectacle that they could muster; the captive King, after all, had a point to prove and a reputation to repair.

The Emperor had indicated that, provided all the terms of the ransom were met in full, he might be prepared to release his prisoner on 17th January next.

Queen Eleanor, on receipt of her son’s command, had wasted no time in making her preparations. An impressive fleet was assembled in the ports of Orford, Dunwich and Ipswich and, as money, treasures, hostages and the King’s regalia were steadily transported east ready for shipment, she ordered a guard of reliable and steadfast King’s men whose chief duty was to ensure the safety of the various valuables while they remained on England’s soil.

One of those sturdy men was Josse.

The duty had been frustrating, exhausting and fraught with difficulty. The King might be absent but it seemed to those working so desperately on his behalf that his angry, restless spirit watched over them, always hurrying them, always ready with a harsh word and an impatient cuff across the face when there were mistakes and delays. Josse was billeted at Orford Castle, an extraordinary building put up by Richard’s father, King Henry II, who had taken pride in its strange eighteen-sided shape and its three stout buttressing towers. The old king, Josse reflected one bitter morning when the harsh east wind carried horizontal drops of spiteful, freezing sleet, never had to stand outside his precious castle for three hours checking the contents of an apparently endless cart train.

He could have borne the cold, the frustration and the inefficiency; he could even have ameliorated the last two, had he had the heart. But, like everyone else, his enthusiasm had waned. The people of England had to ransom their King and bring him home, aye, no mistake about their duty there. But they didn’t have to like it.

Josse was embarrassed now by the fervour with which he had initially clamoured for King Richard’s release. He seemed to hear his own voice railing at his uncle, crying out against the terrible humiliation of the King of England being walled up in a foul dungeon, and he heard his uncle’s anguished reply: it is not to be borne! But that was then, when the outrage was news and did not as yet have a price upon it. Now, nearly a year later, Richard’s subjects knew just what it was costing them to get him back and were privately wondering if he was worth it. What’s he ever done for us? people muttered, quite openly, as if they didn’t care who heard. Comes a-hurrying over four years ago for his coronation, fills his coffers with England’s wealth then off he goes on crusade, and that was a waste of time and money if ever there was one since the Lionheart didn’t capture the Holy City as he’d promised. Didn’t so much as set foot in it, so they said, but sat on his horse looking down on Jerusalem and crying his eyes out like a child denied a plaything because God hadn’t seen fit to allow him to deliver the city from His enemies.

Then, to cap it all, King Richard goes and gets himself captured, would you believe it, by some upstart duke who promptly hands him over to the Emperor! To the people of England, it was almost inconceivable that their King, who had set off with such a force of arms that it had taken thousands of ships to carry everything (the tale had grown in the telling), could have been taken against his will. What of all his soldiers? What of those companies of heavily armed men guarding him? Couldn’t they have prevented this disaster that was making beggars of everyone? Josse could have explained to them, had he been of a mind, that the King had been separated from his main force of arms and was virtually undefended; that, having been shipwrecked south of Trieste on his way home from Acre, he’d had little choice but to opt for the overland route, despite the fact that it took him into the territory of his mortal enemy, Duke Leopold of Austria, where his merchant’s disguise had been penetrated and his capture had swiftly ensued.

But Josse was as tired and dispirited as everyone else and he didn’t bother.

Now, his guard duty done — he had been relieved by a company of eager knights whose youth and innocence made him feel very old — Josse was heading for home. He thought — he hoped — that it was merely a product of his state of mind, but in reality he felt far from well. His throat ached, he had a congestion in his chest that produced a constant, phlegmy cough, and his limbs ached. Horace plodded steadily along beneath him, well-behaved and calm, and Josse sat in the saddle and dozed.

He made a couple of overnight stops, then crossed the Thames estuary and went on with his journey. He still felt ill; a concerned serving woman in a tavern outside Colchester had given him a hot drink which she said would ease his cough but instead it had made him vomit, which had caused his throat to hurt even more. Riding miserably towards the North Downs, he had an unexpectedly cheering thought: he would not go home to New Winnowlands; he would turn aside and instead go to Hawkenlye Abbey. The infirmarer there was an old friend and he had more faith in her healing powers than in anyone else’s on Earth. She would fuss over him, tuck him up in a cot with clean sheets and a hot stone at his feet, cover him with warm woollen blankets and spoon medicines and rem edies into his mouth. Her nursing nuns would glide calmly up and down the long infirmary, giving him serene and caring smiles and occasionally pausing to put a cool white hand on his hot forehead, and he would lie there being looked after until he felt better. Clucking to Horace, he kicked the big horse into a canter and hastened on his way.

The solicitude with which he was received at Hawkenlye was all that he had envisaged. Sister Euphemia, reaching up to place the envisioned cool hand on his forehead, studied him briefly and then gave a quick nod. She summoned a nursing nun — to Josse’s delight it was young Sister Caliste, a favourite of his — and gave orders for him to be put to bed at the far end of the infirmary ‘where it’s more peaceful’. However, given the sharp look that she gave him when, amid his effusive thanks, he broke off to cough, he reckoned that his placement away from others had more to do with her concern that everybody else currently sick at Hawkenlye Abbey would not end up coughing too.

It was odd, he mused, following Sister Caliste’s slim, upright form down the long ward, how some sicknesses could pass from one person to another. Things like a headache or the pain of a sprained wrist, for example, you kept to yourself, but coughs, fevers and inflammations of the lungs seemed to jump from body to body as if some malign and invisible spirit bore them through the air …

They had reached the curtained-off recess where he was to be cared for. Sister Caliste tactfully turned her back while he took off his heavy cloak and slipped out of his tunic, shirt and hose and, dressed only in his thin undershirt, crawled into bed. The sheets were as cool on his hot skin as he had dreamed they would be and he just knew that as soon as his blood cooled down and the shivers began, Sister Caliste would return to cover him with a warm blanket. With a smile she disappeared between the curtains, but presently she returned and made him drink a concoction that tasted almost as bad as that of the Colchester serving woman. The only difference was, he reflected as at last he gave in to sleep, was that the Hawkenlye infirmarer’s medicine worked the other way round: it didn’t make him vomit and it did stop his cough.

He slept, dreamed and dozed the day away. Sister Caliste came to see him briefly now and again, once bringing him some savoury broth and a couple of times giving him more of the medicinal draught, although he detected that the subsequent doses had been watered down and were less potent. Once he opened his eyes and thought he saw the Abbess’s face staring down at him but it could have been a dream; the Abbess seemed to feature quite regularly in his dreams. Later, when it was dark, he was given a cool drink and someone — he thought it was Sister Euphemia — said a prayer over him whose main point appeared to be to ask God and His angels to watch over Josse until the morning. Then, with that most comforting thought in mind, he slept again, this time long, deep and dreamlessly, and he did not wake up until morning.

He realised straight away that he felt better. Much better, in fact; the heat in his skin had gone and so had the sore throat. He tried an experimental cough and managed to produce only a small amount of phlegm. Aye, he was on the mend, no doubt about it. He noticed that he was very hungry and, as if she had been waiting outside the curtains for him to appreciate this fact, Sister Caliste appeared bearing a bowl of porridge and a cool drink.

As the infirmarer had done the previous day, she put her hand on his forehead. Smiling, she said, ‘Your fever has passed for the time being, Sir Josse, although it may return later in the day, that being the way of fevers.’

‘I feel quite well,’ he assured her. ‘I’d like to-’

‘Get up?’ She smiled again.

‘You have learned to read men’s minds in the course of your nursing training, Sister,’ he observed.

‘Oh, no. Sister Euphemia has that talent, but not I. If I guess right, it is only because I learn through constant repetition. Sir Josse, nine people out of ten want to get up the first morning they wake to find their fever gone.’

‘But you do not let them.’ He was depressingly sure of it.

‘No,’ she agreed, taking the empty porridge bowl from him and straightening his sheet and blanket, ‘because if we were to do so, they would spend a happy hour or two believing themselves recovered, then come creeping back to us with their hot, aching heads in their hands and feeling more ill than they were in the first place.’

‘Oh.’

His mournful monosyllable made her smile again. ‘Do not worry,’ she whispered, putting her sweet mouth close to his ear, ‘I think I may safely assure you that you’ll be up and about tomorrow.’

Then, with the suggestion of a wink that, in a fully professed nun, was highly daring, she was gone.

Sister Euphemia came to have a thorough look at him later in the morning, ordering him to open his mouth widely so that she could look down his throat, making him give a cough or two, putting her ear to his chest to listen to his breathing and smoothing the hair back from his forehead with her hand as she tested him for fever. What she observed must have reassured her for she allowed his curtains to be drawn back. He would have liked her to stay and talk to him — as yet he had not even begun to catch up on what had been happening in the Abbey since his last visit — but she seemed preoccupied and he guessed she had too much to do to waste her time gossiping with him. With a nod of approval, she left him.

Now that he was able to observe the comings and goings in the main body of the infirmary, time passed far more quickly and interestingly and he found that being confined to bed when he felt well was not so bad after all. He was puzzled, though, because although both the infirmarer and Sister Caliste had given the strong impression that they were very busy and had their minds on other things, it did not appear that there were all that many patients in the infirmary needing their care. As always, there were plenty of nursing nuns calmly going about their duties and Josse would have thought that this was in fact a relatively quiet time. He firmly squashed the small, peeved voice that said, one of those nuns ought surely to be able to spare a moment of her time for me …

As the morning wore away — he had earlier watched the nuns troop out for Tierce and now they were coming back from Sext — he wondered how soon he might see the Abbess. He believed, although he did not know for certain, that it was her custom to visit the infirmary at least once each day, probably more often if there were very sick patients who needed the comfort of her presence. She does not spare herself, he thought, she-

There was a small stirring at the infirmary door; three nursing nuns paused in their work to bow and an old woman’s quavery voice called out from a bed just beyond the entrance, ‘God bless you, my lady!’

The Abbess Helewise had arrived to visit the sick.

Josse waited patiently for some time for his turn. The Abbess had worked her way steadily up the long ward in his general direction, stopping to speak to what patients there were, but then, when it seemed she must surely come on to him, she turned and went back the way she had come, striding down the room and disappearing into a curtained recess like the one in which Josse lay but at the far end of the infirmary.

She was in there for some time.

Then at last she emerged and marched even more swiftly back up the ward and straight to his bedside. She took his hands in hers, raised one of them to touch it briefly to her cheek and said, ‘Sir Josse, forgive me that I come to you last. There were pressing calls I had to make and I was reassured this morning that you are much better.’

‘No need for apologies, my lady,’ he replied, managing to give her hand a squeeze before she withdrew it, ‘for as you say I am no longer sick and others must take precedence.’

‘Not in the least!’ She looked quite shocked, the grey eyes widening. ‘I saved my visit to you until last so that I would not have to hasten away.’

Feeling himself grin with pleasure like a boy given an unexpected and undeserved treat, Josse said, ‘Then pull up that stool, my lady, and let us catch up with one another’s news.’

She insisted that he speak first and so he told her all about the summons to Orford and the tedium of guarding the ransom, the miserable, apprehensive hostages and the King’s treasures. She was the only person on Earth to whom he would have confessed his disenchantment with the whole business of Richard and his confounded ransom. His impulse to confide was justified; as soon as he had spoken — lowering his voice to a conspiratorial mutter — she whispered back that she felt exactly the same and was filled with compassion for the people, especially the poor, who, because of their sovereign’s carelessness in allowing himself to be captured, were having such a struggle to buy back his freedom.

They stared at each other and he had the feeling that she was as grateful as he for a trusted friend to whom it was possible to speak the truth. Confirming his suspicion, she said quietly, ‘What a relief, Sir Josse, to stop the pretence, even though but briefly; I fear it must be only for this moment.’

‘Indeed, my lady, and in truth we must not repeat these words.’

‘Will the ransom be sufficient?’ she asked.

He sighed. ‘They say the sum falls short of the demand, but the Emperor speaks of a release date so we can only hope that he will settle for what is on offer.’

‘It will be better than nothing,’ she said thoughtfully.

‘Aye, and we’ll all breathe more easily if we know the deal is done and the King is on his way home.’

‘It will be a great weight off all our minds,’ she agreed, and he knew without asking that she referred not to having King Richard back in England but to the definite cessation of the alarming, ruinous levies.

There was silence between them for a time, the sort of easy silence that old friends fall into when they have finished discussing one topic and are not quite ready for the next. Then he said, ‘What of life at Hawkenlye, my lady? I observe for myself that there are not too many patients here in the infirmary, yet for all that there is an air of preoccupation among the nuns, as if something worries them.’

She shot him a glance. Then, after a short pause, said, ‘All is well with us here, Sir Josse, and I thank you for the enquiry. My nuns and monks are busy, as always, but that is what they are here for. We have fewer pilgrims coming to take the holy water in the Vale, but that is on account of the cold and not, I am sure, because our shrine loses its attraction. Those who do brave the winter weather are greeted with extra rations of food and the luxury of a small fire at night. And, of course, the kind attentions of Brother Firmin and his companions. Otherwise’ — there was a vaguely panicky look in her face as she cast around for a way to complete her brief account — ‘otherwise, as I said, all is well.’

He waited. After a moment, she looked up and met his eyes. Very gently he said, ‘Now why not tell me the truth?’